The end of the election is now in sight. Some among the anti-Hillary brigades have decided, in deference to their exquisite sensibilities, to stay at home on Election Day, rather than vote for Mrs. Clinton. But most Americans will soon make their choice. It will be either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton—experienced, forward-looking, indomitably determined and eminently sane. Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.

Anyway, that was the last graf of a column headlined “Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome.” In it, she stated the painfully obvious fact that far, far too many Americans — mostly Republicans — that she is the only person who stands between us and the complete degradation of the U.S. presidency.

It simply is not intellectually or morally defensible to say, as too many of our Republican friends do, “Yes, Trump is awful, but so is Hillary.” No. Not even close. Not even in the same universe. Whatever else you say about her, she is a person with the experience, intellectual capacity and temperament to be president of the United States.

And Donald Trump most emphatically is not. All the rest is a waste of breath…

Clinton should stop pretending she’s not elite — Amen to that, David Ignatius! It may be all the rage this year to be unqualified, but the thing is that she is qualified, and she should flaunt it. Enough with the populist posing! As Mr. Ignatius says, “But let’s be honest: Her strength is that she’s the voice of experienced, centrist leadership.” Absolutely. She’s a legitimate member of the responsible governing consensus, and that is her one saving grace. Harrumph.

As I did last night, I’m going to post my Tweets here as I post them, and y’all respond as you are moved to. I’m getting some good reactions on Twitter so far tonight.

As I type this, Biden and Bloomberg have spoken. POTUS and Kaine still to come. Just saw a PBS interview with Leon Panetta that makes me sorry I missed his speech. He apparently talked about the most important consideration (which too few in that hall, and at the GOP convention last week, think about or understand) — how extraordinarily dangerous Trump would be for the whole world.

Addressing the author as “Dear Orwell”, Eliot, then a director at publishing firm Faber & Faber, writes on 13 July 1944 that the publisher will not be acquiring Animal Farm for publication. Eliot described its strengths: “We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane—and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver.” . . .

Eliot

“I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing,” wrote Eliot to Orwell. “And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

I was looking for something completely unrelated, something actually having to do with work if you can believe it, when I ran across the image above this morning — and laughed.

Guiltily.

I mean, it’s a cruel joke, in a sense, mocking mothers’ attempts to get their kids to feel some concern for hungry children in distant lands.

Then there’s the tasteless suggestion that children should be something other than sober.

But hey, it’s grown men in the picture, and men dressed like Daddy in cliche depictions from the ’40s and ’50s, which in the Age of Irony is automatically laugh-worthy, right? Nothing so laughable as uptight white guys trying to get down, is there?

Anyway, however one may overthink it afterwards, it cracked me up when I found it unexpectedly…

But I’m a creep; I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing reading about the BUSINESS side of music?

A few things that might spark conversation (if only this weren’t a Friday):

Nikki Haley says she’ll help Obama find the money to keep Guantanamo open — Just call her NIMBY Haley from now on. This cockiness about helping POTUS find money comes from the woman who thinks we should finance roads by either a) cutting another tax by a larger amount than that needed for roads or b) taking it from other programs even though roads have their own dedicated funding source, one that hasn’t been raised for 29 years.

Cruz’s latest fights with fellow Republicans are a reminder: Many simply don’t like him — And see, this is why we’re in the horrible situation described in the previous item: Two things characterize Cruz: Tout le monde sees him as the only guy to stop Trump, and he is a guy who causes normal Republicans to say such things as what the former speaker of the House said — that he “never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” If only there were a sane option out there that leading Republicans didn’t hate… someone like… I don’t know… KASICH?

Richland County Council will have a special work session Friday afternoon to discuss Wednesday’s revelation from the Department of Revenue that the county’s transportation penny sales tax revenue would be cut off until the county brings the penny program into “compliance with state tax laws.”

Council will meet at 3 p.m. Friday in Council Chambers at 2020 Hampton St., Columbia, only to discuss the Department of Revenue penny tax issue. The discussion could move behind closed doors, as council has done regularly for updates and discussions on the matter during regular council meetings….

Executive session. Yeah, because, you know, what this situation needs is less transparency…

What kinds of things has the county been spending penny tax money on other than roads and buses?

You’ll never guess. Really. Not in a million years (unless you already know, which is cheating)…

Analyzing months of reports from the Small and Local Business Enterprise Office – an office that the Department of Revenue (DOR) contends was improperly funded from penny tax revenue and which the county has agreed to repay in full through its general fund – the county paid:

$169,687 to Strategic Business & Politics LLC, a single-employee business owned, S.C. Secretary of State records show, by Duane Cooper, the executive director of the South Carolina House Democratic Caucus. The business address is listed as 701 Gervais St., Suite 150-208, which is a mailbox at the UPS Store.

$178,809 to Mizzell & Associates, a public relations/marketing firm held by former Richland County Councilman Tony Mizzell. Mizzell, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for Columbia City Council in 2010.

$674,440 to P.J. Noble and Associates, Pat Noble’s Columbia-based marketing company that in 2010 was the subject of news reports questioning a $65,000 public relations contract with the City of Columbia over North Main Street improvements. Noble worked in the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety under former Gov. Richard “Dick” Riley.

$486,201 to J.B. Ladner & Associates, a one-person firm owned by Clarence Hill, an independent planning professional and former S.C. State professor, for outreach work.

The $1.5 million in public relations/outreach payments is over and above the $3 million awarded to two private firms – BANCO Bannister and Campbell Consulting – for penny tax public relations work. Owners Heyward Bannister and Darrell Campbell are well-known Democratic consultants, with Bannister having run the political campaigns for the penny tax both in 2010, when it was defeated, and again in 2012….

So I have to ask — if county has spent $4.5 million on public relations, how come it keeps getting nothing but black eyes over the penny tax?

You can do a heap of image-building on $4.5 million. But here’s the thing: Where is all that image-building? There’s a website… and… well, I don’t know what else. (There was a public info meeting about the tax yesterday and I’m kicking myself because I missed it. If anyone attended, and got a good answer to that question, please share.)

Y’all remember when I worked for the Post, don’t you? I “covered” Mark Sanford’s infamous confessional presser for them in 2009. Which is to say, I was there, and I took notes, and I interviewed a person or two after, and I called in to consult with the editor — but I did not write one word of the resulting story. Someone in New York who had watched it on TV did that. But they gave me the byline, because I was their excuse for using a Columbia dateline.

Anyway, they seem to have surprised no one by endorsing Trump in the New York primary. They say “he reflects the best of ‘New York values’,” which I suppose is one reason why I live in South Carolina:

He’s from New York; it’s from New York. He likes to grab headlines with brash comments; it likes to write them.

Now, this relationship is going to another level. Surprising few, if any, the New York Post’s editorial board has endorsed Donald Trump in New York’s upcoming Republican presidential primary.

“Trump is now an imperfect messenger carrying a vital message,” the editorial board wrote. “But he reflects the best of ‘New York values’ — and offers the best hope for all Americans who rightly feel betrayed by the political class.”…

You know how, the other day, I said something about how editorial board members tended to favor Kasich, if they favored anyone in the GOP race? And how that was accompanied by pious, self-congratulatory language about how wise editorialists tend to be?

Well, a “consensus” doesn’t mean everybody. The Post goes its own way…

Photograph taken from a Japanese plane during the torpedo attack on ships moored on both sides of Ford Island. View looks about east, with the supply depot, submarine base and fuel tank farm in the right center distance. A torpedo has just hit USS West Virginia on the far side of Ford Island (center). Other battleships moored nearby are (from left): Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee (inboard of West Virginia), Oklahoma (torpedoed and listing) alongside Maryland, and California. On the near side of Ford Island, to the left, are light cruisers Detroit and Raleigh, target and training ship Utah and seaplane tender Tangier. Raleigh and Utah have been torpedoed, and Utah is listing sharply to port. Japanese planes are visible in the right center (over Ford Island) and over the Navy Yard at right. Japanese writing in the lower right states that the photograph was reproduced by authorization of the Navy Ministry. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph.

I answered that “Actually, Beth, for what it’s worth, 30 percent of the minority of people expected to vote in GOP primary is not ‘the people’….” I then added, “Also, isn’t the Lexington county clerk sort of technically ‘the Establishment’?”

I’m a huge fan of Leo McGarry, the “West Wing” chief of staff who is one of many fictitious characters I wish actually lived in the world we inhabit.

If Leo’s a Jacksonian, then they can’t be all bad.

But I’m not a fan of “Big Block of Cheese Day.” Not that I mind occasionally giving people from the margins a hearing — if only because it provided for some comic relief on the show, as it punctured some of the leading characters’ sense of self-importance, which Aaron Sorkin loved to do. It’s that I connect it with the penchant of Andrew Jackson of inviting rowdy people in to trash the White House. (Yeah, I’m kind of conflating the cheese incident with his inaugural bash, but bear with me.)

My second major in college was history (I don’t think I ever declared it; I just took that many history electives), and I sort of concentrated on the early years of the United States. And I became convinced at that time that the election of Jackson was one of the great political disasters our nation has suffered. It’s been a lot of years and I don’t remember my reasons, but a lot of it had to do with Jackson being an exemplar (in my young mind) of American anti-intellectualism and John Quincy Adams one of the best-qualified men ever to offer for the job.

I am not, you see, a populist.

All of that said, I read with interest this morning this piece by Columbia native Walter Russell Mead, headlined “Andrew Jackson, Revenant,” with the subhed, “The biggest story in America today is the roaring return of Andrew Jackson’s spirit into the political debate.” Going into it, I assumed it was about Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders. (Oh, you doubt Bernie would put a Big Block of Cheese in the White House and invite folks to come and bring their knives? I don’t.)

But after saying a lot of things in general about Jacksonians in history and the present day, Mead only really got around to tying them to Trump.

But that’s appropriate enough.

One surprising thing, to me, was the several ways these Jacksonians are like me: They are not joiners. They despise both parties equally. And… OK, that’s about all we have in common, except maybe for a belief in a strong national defense, and they don’t believe in that quite in the way I do, or for the same reasons.

But it illustrates how complicated politics can be, that I can have some things in common with a movement that makes me want to hug the Democratic and Republican establishments protectively.

This excerpt offers a sense of what Mead means when he speaks of Jacksonians, not entirely unsympathetically:

For President Barack Obama and his political allies in particular, Jacksonian America is the father of all evils. Jacksonians are who the then Senator had in mind when, in the campaign of 2008, he spoke of the ‘bitter clingers’ holding on to their guns and their Bibles. They are the source of the foreign policy instincts he most deplores, supporting Israel almost reflexively, demanding overwhelming response to terror attacks, agitating for tight immigration controls, resisting diplomacy with Iran and North Korea, supporting Guantanamo, cynical about the UN, skeptical of climate change, and willing to use ‘enhanced interrogation’ against terrorists in arms against the United States.

He hates their instincts at home, too. It is Jacksonians who, as I wrote in Special Providence back in 2001, see the Second Amendment as the foundation of and security for American freedom. It is Jacksonians who most resent illegal immigration, don’t want to subsidize the urban poor, support aggressive policing and long prison sentences for violent offenders and who are the slowest to ‘evolve’ on issues like gay marriage and transgender rights.

The hate and the disdain don’t spring from anything as trivial as pique. Historically, Jacksonian America has been the enemy of many of what President Obama, rightly, sees as some of America’s most important advances. Jacksonian sentiment embraces a concept of the United States as a folk community and, over time, that folk community was generally construed as whites only. Lynch law and Jim Crow were manifestations of Jacksonian communalism, and there are few examples of race, religious or ethnic prejudice in which Jacksonian America hasn’t indulged. Jacksonians have come a long way on race, but they will never move far enough and fast enough for liberal opinion; liberals are moving too, and are becoming angrier and more exacting regardless of Jacksonian progress….

All of that and more leads up to his assertion that “What we are seeing in American politics today is a Jacksonian surge.”

What am I likely to say? Probably something on the lines of what I said in this comment earlier in the week:

I’m thinking we had an important alignment of the planets last night. Both Barack Obama and Nikki Haley using their big moments — his last SOTU, her first turn on the national stage — to urge people to reject the worst, most negative elements of our politics today…

That’s special. That’s important. That’s worth celebrating.

I’m proud of them both…

Or maybe something else that occurs to me between now and then. We’ll see…

Oh, by the way, a couple of other things to mention, while I’m thinking about the coming week:

Friday, I’m having coffee with Stephanie Formas, SC communications director for Hillary Clinton. Stephanie reached out to comment on a blog post the other day, and I thought it was time to get acquainted.

It’s about time I started actually paying close attention to the upcoming primaries.

I mention this in case y’all have any thoughts about questions they should be asked. I’m NOT promising to ask them; I don’t even promise myself anything like that going into an interview. I tend to wait and see where a conversation goes and seize opportunities accordingly, in keeping with the Fremen saying, “Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.”

For that matter, these casual meetings may end up off the record, since they are both in the get-acquainted (or re-acquainted) category.